David’s Dialogues
October- Helping the Hungry
Dear Friend,
As I might have mentioned before, the Hokie Family (collection of Engage Groups) that I co-lead meets on Thursday nights. We usually gather for dinner, an activity, and prayer, before the individual engage groups split off to their respective meeting locations. The way the calendar fell in October led to three weeks of conflicting dates on Thursdays: Fall Break weekend (many students leave on Thursday), the following week was our big food drive and home football game, and then the third week was an away football game. Despite all that, our Hokie Family (and NLCF as a whole) still moved the kingdom forward!
Since many students left early for Fall Break, we decided instead of a regular family time/Engage Group night, we would take a field trip to Homeplace, a local restaurant that’s a favorite of many. This provided another opportunity to invite friends to join in our community. To see the impact of such events, last year a student came to our Homeplace trip as his first NLCF activity, and now he’s growing into one of our stronger male leaders.
Later in the month, NLCF participated in two different hunger-related projects. Our main focus was with the 20th Annual “Hokies for the Hungry” canned food and donation drive. NLCF partnered with the Marching Virginians (Virginia Tech marching band) to walk the parking lots before the VT vs. Miami football game, collecting food and contributions to help alleviate hunger in the local New River Valley area. I’m excited to say that we collected 3,422 cans and $8,923 for the Montgomery County Christmas Store. The following Saturday, we partnered with our community congregation, New Life, for a meal packing event through an organization called Stop Hunger Now. The event (featured in this video) raised $7,065 and packed 24,192 meals!
On a more personal note…
As my ministry team, I wanted to introduce a special someone to you: Ms. Ally VanCampen. Ally and I have been dating for the past few years, and recently became engaged on October 8th!
We are both incredibly excited and thankful. She is not just a wonderful fiancé, but she is also a co-laborer for Christ. We actually met because of NLCF! Ally co-leads the Hokie Family with me, in addition to discipling several young women and leading one of our worship bands. For our engagement story, check out my blog post here.
October was definitely a whirlwind of a month, and one that I will not easily forget. Thank you for helping me continue to make an impact in the lives of college students through Reliant and NLCF!
In Christ,
David
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David McCann 